The White Washing and Racialization of Disasters: From 911 to Hurricane Katrina to Moore, Oklahoma

Let me begin by saying that victims of disasters--be they
human-made or natural-- are just that:
victims. Their deaths are always
tragic because if nothing else they come too soon. As human beings, their bodies are of equal
value and the loss of life is felt by everyone who knows them and loves them.

That said, we know most vividly from the news coverage and
national reaction to Hurricane Katrina that social inequality shapes our
perceptions of disasters and our responses to them. During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
images of poor African Americans streamed into our living rooms through our TVs
and along with those images criticism that President Bush's response to Katrina
was slowed by racism.

And, if not out-right racism, there is ample evidence that
assumptions and stereotypes about the victims of Hurricane Katrina impacted our
individual and national responses.

September 8, 2008: Mrs. Bush, after touring the Astrodome
complex in Houston on Monday, said: ''What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary,
is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.
And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged
anyway, so this is working very well for them." She commented during a
radio interview with the American Public Media program ''Marketplace."
(AP)

There has been much less controversy over the national
reaction to the tragedy of 911; probably because of the sheer enormity of the
tragedy and the nationalism that it inspired in many if not most
Americans. Yet, on the ten year
anniversary of 911 my husband and I sat on the couch watching the victims names
being read--a very depressing stretch of hours--and paying attention, as scholars
of inequality often do--to the race and ethnicity of the 3000 Americans who lost
their lives. We were struck by how many
people of color and African Americans in particular had died. That wasn't the image that we had
collectively created--with the help of the media--of the typical victim.

The past two weeks have been devastating for the state of Oklahoma. Our hearts go out to all of the families
there who lost loved ones and whose lives are changed forever by the experience
of the tornado and the loss of their property.
As the pictures reveal, hundreds of people lost literally everything.

In the last week I've wondered how one moves on from this
kind of tragedy. As a well-educated
professional, I can't begin to image where one even starts. Does the city hold seminars at the library
called "Rebuilding 101: The steps in
rebuilding your life and your home?"
What access to resources do the victims really have? Many must have to stay in hotels they can't
afford, many are probably missing paychecks because the job they held no longer
exists. Does FEMA or insurance or disaster
funds really help people cover all of these expenses?

Thinking about all of this took me back to Hurricane Katrina
and the anniversary of 911 and I started to realize that the very early
coverage of the tornado in Moore, Oklahoma included people of color. But, as the days passed and the coverage grew
more intense---literally 24/7 coverage with images streaming into our living
rooms once again---I realized that I was seeing images mostly of White
people. Where had the people of color
gone, I wondered?

So, I did a little research.
In the neighborhood that was most devastated by the tornado, 12.5% of
the population is African American and 72% of the population is White. When I researched the victims, I learned that
11 or 26% of the people who were killed by the tornado were Black, twice the
number we would have predicted if a tornado were really a random event. Do the
black residents of Moore live in the sections most heavily impacted? Do they have less access to safety? This, of course, is a whole other intriguing
issue that will require much more research to explain.

Yet, I couldn't remember seeing the pictures of any African
Americans when the news stories focused on the victims or their funerals. So, naturally I turned to GOOGLE. I reviewed a couple of hundred images that
were published in newspapers or as part of television accounts. Out of these hundreds of images, I found only
a few images that included African Americans.
There were three images of African American victims. But the vast majority of the images that
included African Americans--and there weren't many--were of President Obama and
Kevin Durant touring the devastation.

Certainly GOOGLE is not a scientific measure of
anything. But, it is an excellent source
of the information that is transmitted into the lives of most Americans--via the
TV, twitter, facebook, and even online news sources--today most Americans get
their news in some way from the internet.

My simple research project revealed quite clearly that the
media has a tendency to white wash disasters--with the exception of Hurricane
Katrina where the goal seemed to be to paint the victims as having some
responsibility for their own conditions.

In any case, it leads me to wonder, what role does the media
portrayal of a disaster have on our collective and national response to
it? If the lessons from Hurricane
Katrina are applicable to other disasters, it
suggests that when the media white washes a tragedy the government and
the public are more sympathetic toward it and perhaps more likely to respond
quickly and appropriately.

Associate Director of Women & Gender Studies, George Mason University, author of African American Families: Myths and Realities (2012), the Social Dynamics of Family Violence (2012), Prisoner Reentry and Social Capital (2011) and several other books (more...)